AN international humanitarian organisation has begun trialing the use of unmanned drones to give Papua New Guineans sick with tuberculosis in isolated communities more access to treatment.Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), a Nobel Peace Prize winning organisation, has teamed up with American drone-making company Matternet to begin using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transport TB test results, medicines, blood work and other medicinal entities from some of the country’s most inaccessible areas to towns where hospitals and TB treatment can be found.This revolutionary technology, which prior to 2005 had only been used for military operations, is now being trialed in the Western Province to ease the painstaking exercise of TB patients travelling for days for treatment in Kerema town.MSF programs manager Eric Pujo said during an interview yesterday that the NGO had seen the difficulty TB patients from remote PNG areas had in travelling to urban areas for treatment. But the use of UAVs will now tackle that problem.He explained that with this new system of treatment and testing, a village health care worker could run tests and have them sent on the UAV to Kerema for analysis before the treatment is sent back on the same craft within the space of a day.Mr Pujo admitted that the transport and logistics element of the whole TB issue was one of the main reasons why the epidemic was serious, adding that this was particularly bad in Gulf Province, which has the highest number of deaths per annum in the country."Many villagers in the Gulf contract the airborne pandemic and have to travel days and even weeks at a time to get to the nearest health centre where they are tested and asked to come back later. This we feel needs to stop as this gross wastage of valuable treatment time is costing us lives on a daily basis," he added.So far more than 15 trial UAV flights have been done with only one reported failed run due to what Matternet technical experts say was a technical issue with the range equipment.Mr Pujo expressed confidence in the trialling of the drones, saying it is going to be successful and can be replicated in other parts of the country.The trials come close to two months after Prime Minister Peter O’Neill launched a national TB awareness campaign after health authorities expressed concern at the spreading epidemic and picked out the provinces of Gulf, Western and parts of Central as hot spots for the disease.Early this month the Government announced the establishment of a Ministerial Task Force on TB chaired by the Health and HIV/AIDS Minister Michael Malabag.